Bad Boy Street

It all depends on what you’re in the mood for. Had a rough week at work? Just want to crawl under the covers and unwind to a low-budget, trick-turns-into-more indie that’s light on plot, heavy on sex, with some great shots of Paris thrown in so you can at least tell your snooty friends you were watching a foreign film? Then "Bad Boy Street" will service you just fine. If you just got done watching the Jean Cocteau Collection, however, and are on a mad quest for its art-house equal, delete this hothouse B-Movie from your queue toute de suite.

Coming back from a night on the tiles, dashing, middle-aged Claude (Yann de Monterno) literally picks up a passed-out American stud named Brad (Kevin Miranda) from the sidewalk on La rue des Mauvais-Garçons in Le Marais and walks him all the way to his apartment near Montmartre.

After putting the tall-dark-and-handsome inebriate to bed, the Good Samaritan sleeps on the couch and opens his eyes the next morning to find that, for the first time in a long time, his day starts with a happy ending. Steamy scenes ensue between Claude and Brad, who apparently just needs a couple aspirin to bounce back the morning after being trawled out of the gutter.

When Claude’s best friend Catherine (Florence D’Azemar), the Grace to Claude’s Will, drops by, Brad bolts out of sight. It’s the first in a series of disappearing acts Brad will perform. Reason: Brad has a secret identity and there’ll be both hell and lawyers to pay if the lid is blown off it. There’s never any telling when or if Brad is coming back as Claude beats himself up for being old enough to know better.

Did Verow think that just because Miranda has a hot body, we wouldn’t notice that he also has a French accent you couldn’t cut with a Brie knife?

American writer-director Todd Verow appears not to have envisioned his film washing up on to home shores or else he would have at least done something about Kevin Miranda’s accent. For someone cast to play an American, Miranda makes almost no attempt to sound American, much less like someone from the southwest. We’re just supposed to buy that he’s from Arizona because he’s wearing a T-shirt that says Arizona.

Did Verow think that just because Miranda has a hot body, we wouldn’t notice that he also has a French accent as thick as a wheel of Brie? If this were the latest Falcon Studios release, we might give this oversight a pass -- but "Bad Boy Street" bills itself as a drama, so we should be able to expect more.

But, look, it is what it is. And it has its merits. Accent problems aside, the acting is good, especially from the wistful Yann de Monterno as Claude. Verow has proved himself a true agent of the digital revolution in capturing Paris’s transcendent beauty with a canny, if at times shaky, camera. And with European flair, "Bad Boy Street" shows that today’s May-December relationships are all-systems-go for hot bodies and hot sex.

"Bad Boy Street"DVDTLA Releasingwww.tlareleasing.com$19.99

Kyle Thomas Smith is author of the novel 85A (Bascom Hill, 2010). He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and two cats.